Students examine these photographs of fatty food or school meals sent in by children logging onto the Newsround website.

In pairs, students chose one picture and list all the food they can see in the photograph (one line per item).

Introduce the following food groups:

protein

carbohydrate

fat

vitamins

water

minerals

fibre

Next to each item in their list, students write down the main food group or groups
contained in a particular food, for example:

Pizza - fat, carbohydrate

Although pizza also contains protein, water and minerals (in the vegetables), the principle food groups are fat (in the cheese) and carbohydrate (in the bread base). Two slices of pizza contain 23g of fat.

For more examples of how many grams of fat containedin different meals, click on the fatty food link in the blue box.

Non-ICT based activity

If students don't have access to the photographs on the Newsround website, they can make a list of the food typically available in their canteen, before listing the main food group(s) next to each item.

Some foods will be easier to classify than others.

Main activity

Design a healthy school menu or a snack vending machine

Menu

Students imagine they are a TV chef, such as Jamie Oliver, designing a day's menu for a healthy school canteen.

They should make sure that foods like meat, fish, eggs and cheese that are needed for growth and those which provide energy like sugar, bread, pasta and rice are included in careful amounts.

They should be aware of foods that contain large amounts of sugars like sweets and jam and that they shouldn't include many of these.

By including fruit and vegetables they will show they know them to be essential components of a healthy diet.

Snack vending machine

Students draw and label a vending machine containing snacks and drinks which are low in sugar, fat and salt.

Some suggestions:

Milk

Fruit juice

Water

Fresh fruit

Dried fruit

Nuts

Yoghurt

Pretzels

Bread sticks

Wall display

Students collect wrappers from such snacks and use them to make a wall display of a giant healthy vending snack machine.

Extension activity

Students keep a diary of their food intake over a week for whole class analysis.

Plenary

Recap on the different food groups.

Students present their designs for a balanced school meal or healthy snack vending machine. The class offer constructive feedback.

Turn this into an assembly

Health barometer.

Collect a range of packaging from foods to act as stimuli.

Label one side of the assembly room more healthy and the other less healthy.

Display each food package. After each, ask a group of four or five volunteers to stand between the two labels to show how healthy they think each food is.

In turn, each volunteer explains to the assembly why they decided to stand where they did.

Teachers' Background

For loads more information on healthy eating, click on the links in the top right of this page.